Almond shows off some of the merchandise. Pink shotgun shells. How cool is that?

The shattering of clay pigeons against the blue Texas sky was a rush and a moment of pride for a novice shooter.

Jeanie Almond comes rambling along the gravel road of Elm Fork Shooting Sports in a pickup covered in pink camouflage. There isn’t a corner of the universe where that car would blend into the background, and the same goes for the 62-year-old gunslinging grandma driving it.

As Almond strides onto the patio at the northwest Dallas range, it’s hard to know where my eyes should focus: There is the immaculate pouf of blond hair, the black shirt bedazzled with red sequins, the silver-and-turquoise medallion hanging at her collarbone, big as a hockey puck.

It’s a lot of flash for 9 a.m., and when I compliment her on it, she places a manicured hand on my arm. “Oh, honey,” she says, “this is me every day.”

“Mama Jeanie,” as she’s known around these parts, is the kind of singular Texas personality about whom people often say, “She should have her own reality show.” Actually, there is one in the works. (She can’t say much more about it.) The only child of a gun aficionado, Almond is a former national shotgun champion who grew into one of the state’s top instructors, and she’s trained everyone from kids to football stars.

After a career spent standing tall in a man’s world, Almond set her sights on women. Her Lipstick and Lead program is one of a growing number of businesses aimed at making females more comfortable with firearms. And this morning, Jeanie Almond is helping me do something that makes me a bit nervous.

“Come on,” she says, taking my hand to lead me inside. “Let me teach you how to shoot like a girl.”

Tough ladies

I grew up in Dallas, the second child of Yankee transplants who were more NPR than NRA. As a kid, I loved the swashbuckling romance of a cowgirl, a tough broad who could wear pretty dresses but wasn’t afraid to splatter them with mud. I adored my older brother (who also happened to adore toy guns, even if my mother did not), and my idea of heaven was the two of us standing together, our invisible rifles leveled at the world.

As I grew older, my attitude toward guns took the form of typical identity politics. I went to high school with affluent conservatives who went on hunting trips and bragged about their trophy kills, and I would flex my liberal muscles by engaging them in debates about animal rights and gun control (although I knew little about either of those topics). As a teenager, I understood Texans as falling into two camps: people who shot guns, worshipped football and went to Bible camp — and people like me.

It was not until I graduated from college that I realized my friends did not have this black-and-white relationship with firearms (or sports or religion, for that matter). One weekend, I stood gape-mouthed as three of my best buddies from the University of Texas — one male, two female — took turns with a .22. We were on a ranch outside Austin, and I could not get over how they shot into a line of tin cans as casually as if they were sipping a Keystone Light. (We were doing that, too.)

When they handed that rifle to me, my small hands were shaking; you’d have thought I was holding a nuclear reactor. But I steadied my heartbeat till I locked in on the shot. I fired the first round directly into the heart of an empty Sunkist can, and knocked down the next three with a gratifying plink. It was so easy. It was so fun. I couldn’t believe it: I had not only fired a gun, I had proven myself a decent shot.

This might not sound like a big deal, but I’m no great shakes at sports. At 5-2, I’ve spent a lifetime finding new ways to say, “I’ll sit this one out.” But my size and my total disinterest in running was not an impediment of any kind here. Annie Oakley, it should be noted, was only 5 feet tall.

Beginner’s luck?

For months after that weekend, I bragged about the triumph. “If the tin cans ever attack, you want to be on my side,” I said, a smile beaming on my face. But my lesson ended there. I never picked up a gun again — that is, until I showed up at Elm Fork, more than a decade later, to find out if I had more than beginner’s luck.

I was also seeking a new peace with my hometown, having moved back to Dallas after years in New York. Once again, I was surrounded by smart, cultured friends who talked about guns with a kind of philosophical reverence, and it made me wonder what I was missing. Listening to a Fresh Air interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow one night, I heard her say she enjoyed shooting on the range with her girlfriend, and I thought: OK, cowgirl, pony up.

Almond was the ideal ambassador for a nervous, clueless gal like me. With seven kids and 23 grandkids, she exudes a maternal warmth. “She’s everybody’s mama,” says her daughter Shellee Enfinger, 39, who co-owns Lipstick and Lead.

As she laid out a 20-gauge shotgun on the table, as she instructed how to track the clay pigeon with my eyes and handle my equipment, I felt completely safe.

Of course, this being a class for women, there was a lot of pink. Almond had .38-caliber bullets shaped like lipstick tubes and a pink pistol on the table. Part of me found all that girlie branding a bit condescending; the other part of me was dying to display half the merchandise on my bookshelf at home. (OMG, you guys, pink bullets!!) Whatever I thought about those products, they made me laugh, which was nice, because I was getting a bit jittery.

Eventually, it was time for me to step up to the trap. Almond stood at my side, gently navigating my hands until they learned their path along the chamber. The gun felt heavy in my grip; Jeanie had warned me that, unlike men, women are stronger in our waists and hips than upper bodies, so holding that beast for a long time can be fatiguing.

She is full of gender-difference tips like this: How women judge distance differently than men; how intuitive we are; how women are the ultimate multitaskers who struggle to surrender to the focus demanded by recreational shooting. Once, Almond was standing beside a woman about to pull the trigger for the first time when she gasped and said, “I forgot to take the chicken out of the oven!”

Focus

Laser focus is a talent worth cultivating — in life, and with a heavy piece of equipment in your hands. I found it came to me, if I stood still. I focused on the clay pigeon as it hurtled into space. I focused on the clear, firm commands Almond issued in my ear.

I did not focus on the fact that I might botch it entirely, and how embarrassing that would be. I did not focus on how my hair fell, how my jeans fit, how ridiculous I might have looked with my tush stuck out as Almond instructed. I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about all that stuff, frankly, and it’s good practice to shake it off for a while. Discovering your own strength and power is always a beautiful thing. Believing otherwise is the real trap.

For a nervous, clueless gal, I did OK. I hit four of my 10 clay pigeons that day, and I felt each one like a tiny pop in my chest. If I close my eyes, I can still see them scattering across the broad, blue Texas sky. Almond gave me a high-five, and I walked out of there feeling like Annie Oakley.

In the weeks after my lesson, guns would re-enter the national conversation, following the hideous violence in Aurora, Colo., but the topic of gun control is a conversation for another time. What Jeanie Almond teaches is the utmost respect for firearms.

She isn’t just teaching women to fire shotguns: Lately, she’s been offering lots of handgun classes to women, and her program for kids and teens, Youth Target Foundation, grew by 700 percent in the past year alone. When she teaches people how to handle their shotguns and their rifles and their pistols, she is doing more than that. She is teaching them how to stand in the world.

Whatever our politics, I want the same things for women that Almond does. I want them to be the heroes of their own lives. I want them to find the kapow of their own fingertips.

After our lesson, Almond was called away for another obligation, and she rambled out of Elm Fork in her pink truck as fast as she had arrived. As we parted, she blew me a kiss in the air, and I shot her one right back.

Sarah Hepola is the personal essays editor at Salon and writes “The Smart Blonde” column for D magazine. Her essay about returning to Dallas appeared in Arts & Life on July 22. Her work also has appeared in The New York Times, Slate and The Morning News (themorningnews.org). She can be reached at sarahhepola@gmail.com.

To learn more

For more on Lipstick and Lead’s programs, check the website lipstickandlead.com or call 972-900-4459.